Thursday, October 11, 2007

Reasons to take away my comic blogger's license

  • I'm actually kind of psyched about all the Tangent Comics stuff going on in DC these days. Now if only someone will revive Amalgam.
  • I'm not exactly psyched about Jim Shooter's return to the Legion. I really like the Waid Legion, and Shooter's admission that he hasn't read the comics in quite some time makes me worried about how well the personalities will remain constant.
  • Yeah, I still really liked "Superman Returns."
  • I can't stand Kevin Nowlan's art, and I've never understood why he's so beloved. Same for Sal Buscema.
  • I tried Nextwave. I thought Nextwave tried too hard. Yes, Fin Fang Foom wears purple underwear, very observant. Can you think of a new joke for issue two, please?
  • Speaking of which, I've never read anything by Warren Ellis that I cared for. Granted, I haven't read much by Ellis. What I read of Authority was rather uninteresting (Joe Kelly was right to treat those characters as a one-note joke, as far as I could tell), his issues of JLA: Classified were utterly boring, and his episode of JLU was a low point in the season.
  • And all that adds up to me having a better opinion of Judd Winick than I do of Warren Ellis, since I actually liked Winick's "Green Lantern."
  • I don't hate Marv Wolfman, nor do I wish any harm to befall him.
  • While I think the end of the Green Arrow marriage was ridiculous, stupid, and gratuitous (and, because of all that, utterly ineffective--my first thought was "okay, is it Everyman or Clayface?"), it was a superhero wedding, which means that something had to go wrong. It's in the superhero bylaws. The only reason Clark and Lois's ceremony went off without a hitch was because they agreed to sacrifice the honeymoon to terrorists. At least this time it was the groom in trouble; Black Canary fared better in that regard than Starfire and Linda Park.
  • I like Adam Strange.

I think that's enough for now.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Warren Ellis is really hit or miss with me. I either love his stuff, or it leaves me really cold. For instance, I'm digging Black Summer a lot, but Doktor Sleepless is tedious and, as you put it, tries way too hard. His straight superhero stuff like JLA and JLU is pretty weak because apparently he only has one story to tell, and Grant Morrison already told it better. Still, I'd recommend reading some more of his stuff before judging too harshly, because he can be a really good writer when he's not just in it for the paycheck.

Anonymous said...

Dude, Adam Strange is awesome.

Anonymous said...

Okay; JLA: New Maps of Hell isn't that good, but it really is far from being a representative Ellis work. It's like judging Mark Waid on The Kingdom.

Really, Transmetropolitan is one of the best comics I've read. Especially if you like politics, writing, truth, and technology.

Also, Thunderbolts, while not being 100% Ellis magic, is pretty cool too. It just feels good to read stories about these D-List superheroes beating the shit out of these despicable A-List villains. It's righteous and novel.

CalvinPitt said...

I don't know Kevin Nowlan, but Buscema is one of those artists that grows on me as I get older. I thought he did a great job with the faces and emotions of characters during his Spectacular Spider-Man run, and a pretty good job with the big time action when he did art on Simonson's Thor run. he's not one of my favorites, but there are any number of artists I'd put him ahead of (I'm not a fan of Frank Quitely myself).

I liked Nextwave, but not as much as the people who screamed "This is what comics fan say they want, and they don't buy it! Comic fans suck!" I laughed sometimes, and I cheered other times.

I don't get people's problems with Marv Wolfman either.

Anonymous said...

Warren Ellis is really hit or miss with me too. Most of it I just give a pass, since his track record with me isn't great, but I *loved* Crécy, which truly is something different.

Will Staples said...

What's so weird about liking Adam Strange? I didn't know he was so unpopular.

I absolutely loved NextWave, but anything else by Uncle Warren is hit-or-miss for me.

Marc Burkhardt said...

Marv Wolfman was a great Marvel writer - the company where he created Nova, gave Spider-Woman a cool back-story and wrote the awesome Tomb of Dracula.

But DC was another story. I always thought New Teen Titans was overly self-important and he it was his idea to kill Supergirl.

No fun, although he did write a few good pre-Crisis Superman stories with Gil Kane.

Anonymous said...

"I've never understood why he's so beloved. Same for Sal Buscema. "

Beloved???? Deal with Sal Buscema was that he could draw, like, 75 pages a week, so yeah, I'm sure he was beloved BY EDITORS, and maybe they were too overworked / dumb to notice that this was really about 25 copies of the same 3 pages, again and again.
Every Sal Buscema fight scene, ever, ended in a shot of the villain flying toward the reader, upside-down face first, with the hero in the distant background doing a big cheezy roundhouse punch.
Were it not for Don Heck (95 pages per week), there would never have been a more boring super-hero comicbook artist than Sal Buscema.

zc said...

man... I really wish they would do something with Amalgam again.